Imaginaries of the Infrastructure for a More Just Data Economy

• In Event: Experimental Infrastructures: Material Insufficiency, Scale, and the Question of (Im)possibility - I

Abstract

Movements under the rubric “data activism” aim to rearrange data industry’s dominant practices to enhance citizen agency, social justice and participation, developing alternative social imaginaries around datafication. These imaginaries are sociotechnical, as visions of an alternative economic and social order concretize in technology projects, including new data infrastructures. In this presentation I focus on MyData, a movement premised on shaping a just, citizen-centric digital society, where individuals participate by managing the use of personal data. MyData represents an infrastructural intervention in individual-level data practices, seeking social change by a commercial and technological ecosystem facilitating user control of personal data exchanges: personal data storages, schemas, exchange protocols, identity frameworks, and permission management tools. To realise this infrastructural project, MyData allies with technology-producing firms, while the firms seek market and policy support for their products. By frame analysis of material collected in a formative event shaping the movement, I examine how alliance formation is supported by framing social change objectives. Infrastructural scalability and resonance across interest groups necessitate broad objectives allowing considerable interpretive flexibility: citizen-centricity, agency and societal participation. Multivalent future imaginaries are concretized in alternative projects that envision citizen agency alternatively as market choice, or as the exercise of rights as data citizens. The imaginary of participation as market agency reinforces dominant conceptualizations of data’s value, allowing the movement’s infrastructure to serve technology providers’ commercial interests. A normative agenda for forms of agency would be necessary to actually rearrange knowledge practices and challenge dominant imaginaries instead of reproducing them.

Author

• Tuukka Lehtiniemi, University of Helsinki